Perhaps. After all, leading Democrats have endorsed a Senate candidate in Maine who sported a Nazi SS tattoo for nearly two decades until it came to light in his current campaign. What’s a little work for an al-Qaeda front in comparison to that?
Adam Hamawy’s past has already come up in this campaign. He assisted the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, both before and after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, for which Abdel-Rahman was tried and convicted for terrorism and seditious conspiracy. Even Politico noted three weeks ago that Hamawy “had a real yearslong association” with Abdel-Rahman, as established at trial. Hamawy shrugged it off as “guilt-by-association attacks on Muslim and Arab candidates.”
It turns out that Hamawy has some other associations that are just as problematic. Jewish Insider dug up Hamawy’s volunteer work in Bosnia as related by Hamawy himself to the Newark Star-Ledger in 1996. He worked with the “Benevolence International Foundation,” a non-profit that later got exposed as a front for al-Qaeda, which provided financial support for Osama bin Laden:
But just one year before Hamawy took the witness stand to describe his travels with Abdel-Rahman, the now-Congressional candidate made a different journey with another party entangled in terrorist conspiracies: to Bosnia, with a group subsequently shut down for providing “logistical support” to Al-Qaida.
In a 1996 interview with the Newark Star-Ledger, according to a copy Jewish Insider recovered through an archive of print publications, Hamawy described volunteering in Bosnia during the summer of 1994 with a Chicago-based nonprofit called the “Benevolence International Foundation.”
“I worked in Sarajevo for 10 days and then the rest in Zenica, a large regional center in central Bosnia,” Hamawy, who had just graduated from medical school, told the paper about the five weeks he spent with the organization. “We went out to hospitals around the area and in the mountains to check what supplies they needed and we tried to deliver them.”
Sarajevo and Zenica were the exact cities where Benevolence International maintained its offices — offices that Bosnian authorities raided in 2002, part of a joint effort with U.S. authorities to dismantle the group, which they had identified as a front for Al-Qaida. The 9/11 Commission Report would later identify the foundation’s base in the Bosnian capital as part of the “impressive array of offices [that] covertly provided financial and other support for terrorist activities” that Osama bin Laden established in the early 1990s.
The 9/11 Commission Report has a single mention of the org on page 58 (and a later footnote), which is directly on point. That narrative starts in 1991, when Hamawy was already working with Abdel-Rahman and hearing him talk about making war on the infidels, about which more in a moment:
Bin Ladin moved to Sudan in 1991 and set up a large and complex set of intertwined business and terrorist enterprises. In time, the former would encompass numerous companies and a global network of bank accounts and nongovernmental institutions. Fulfilling his bargain with Turabi, Bin Ladin used his construction company to build a new highway from Khartoum to Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast. Meanwhile,al Qaeda finance officers and top operatives used their positions in Bin Ladin’s businesses to acquire weapons, explosives, and technical equipment for terrorist purposes. One founding member, Abu Hajer al Iraqi, used his position as head of a Bin Ladin investment company to carry out procurement trips from western Europe to the Far East. Two others, Wadi al Hage and Mubarak Douri,who had become acquainted in Tucson,Arizona, in the late 1980s, went as far afield as China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and the former Soviet states of Ukraine and Belarus.
Bin Ladin’s impressive array of offices covertly provided financial and other support for terrorist activities.The network included a major business enterprise in Cyprus; a “services” branch in Zagreb; an office of the Benevolence International Foundation in Sarajevo, which supported the Bosnian Muslims in their conflict with Serbia and Croatia; and an NGO in Baku, Azerbaijan, that was employed as well by Egyptian Islamic Jihad both as a source and conduit for finances and as a support center for the Muslim rebels in Chechnya. He also made use of the already-established Third World Relief Agency (TWRA) headquartered in Vienna, whose branch office locations included Zagreb and Budapest. (Bin Ladin later set up an NGO in Nairobi as a cover for operatives there.)
The time frame is interesting here as well. Hamawy got called to testify in Abdel-Rahman’s federal trial to reveal the blind sheikh’s true intentions to commit sedition and terrorism. Politico highlighted this in their Playbook piece three weeks ago:
But Hamawy had a real yearslong association with the Sheikh, as laid out in the trial transcript. Most notably, he accompanied him in 1991 on a 13-hour van ride to Michigan for a conference about Islamic economy, where Abdel-Rahman, according to the transcript, talked about “conquering the land of the infidels.”
Hamawy testified he heard that remark but said the prosecution was “kind of taking it out of context.” But Abdel-Rahman’s extensive ties to terrorism were no secret in the U.S. or Egypt. And even after the World Trade Center bombing, Hamawy testified that he visited Abdel-Rahman at his apartment to translate a document for him to read at a press conference.
Hamawy heard the sheikh’s remark in 1991, at the same time bin Laden began creating his archipelago of front groups to fund the jihad. Three years later – a year after the World Trade Center bombing – Hamawy ends up working for an al-Qaeda front group in Bosnia at the very locations bin Laden used to gather resources for terrorism.
Could that all be just a coincidence? Possibly. Does anyone really believe in coincidences at this level? Oh, let’s not always see the same hands … Hamawy may not have participated in terror activities, but he’s been terror-adjacent twice, linked to people and organizations responsible for the deaths of Americans.
And yet, Hamawy has a very good chance at winning a seat in Congress. He’s not a fringe candidate, like Maureen Galindo in Texas. Polls show Hamawy leading a crowded field in New Jersey’s 12th CD Democrat primary. He has endorsements from leading Democrats as well:
Hamawy, who has scored endorsements from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) in his New Jersey congressional bid, did not respond to repeated questions about his relationship with Benevolence International and his contacts and activities in Bosnia.
Has anyone asked Sanders or Khanna to explain their endorsement of Hamawy in light of his dual links to terrorism aimed at the US? If and when that happens, will they tell Americans that they should “contextualize” Hamawy’s history in the same way they expect voters to contextualize Graham Platner’s Totenkopf? Stay tuned.
Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.
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